Non Impediti Ratione Cogitationis

In a recent discussion on Go’s Google Plus Community, some questions came up about cross compiling. In a default installation of Go, cross compiling is not enabled. It only builds to toolchains for your current operating system and architecture. Since all of my computers are amd64, but some of the applications I build need to run on i386, I thought I’d share how I go about doing it. I use Arch linux, so I have provided a package in AUR for doing this. [Read More]

Last week in my local Linux user group mailing list the topic of static blogging came up. I had been thinking of converting my blog over, but wasn’t sure which one I’d prefer to use. One of the responses to my inquiry was: If you’ve been looking for a project with which to learn a new language, writing your own blog engine is a reasonable choice. The ‘market’ is already hopelessly polluted with toy blog engines, which is evidence for its suitability as a learning project. [Read More]

I am now running a few personal Go applications and am working on a Go web application that will eventually be ready for public consumption. Since Go gives us the ability to act as a FastCGI backend or a stand alone web application, it only seems reasonable that in a production system you’d want the ability to use it like any other web server. This includes the ability to reload the configuration on the fly and start and stop the application. [Read More]

I grew up on Emacs and Bash. I love them dearly (I have the pinky fingers to prove it). I’m not so blinded by my faith in them though that I won’t occasionally try new things. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Zsh and I’ve found myself connecting to many a servers that have Vim installed but not Emacs. So, I thought I’d give them a try. Of course, my new pet programming language is Go, so I thought I’d try and get some basic functionality for Go working with Vim. [Read More]

I spent a little bit of time this weekend tinkering on a small project I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. Google’s new(ish) language Go seemed like a good candidate for the project. One of the great features of Go is that your can import external code sources relatively easily. I have a small private repository at home and I wanted to simplify the process of importing the code and maintaining the repositories. [Read More]

I feel like this election has brought me some new insight. Our society has become completely focused on the one-liners, zingers, and memes. We hang tight on every word our favorite candidate says and belittle the other. This of course is what both sides want and we are falling for it. Maybe I’m out there for thinking this, but 90% of what the two candidates believe are essentially the same. In order to make themselves stand apart they twist the fact, cherry-pick numbers, and toss out phrases for tomorrow’s Internet to gobble up. [Read More]

My wife and I went to see [Wicked](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(musical)) for the first time this weekend. While I’m not an avid theater goer, I can say that it is by far the best play I’ve seen. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me think. It’s the thinking part that I’m throwing out on this series of tubes because I think the moral of play is extremely important for our time. [Read More]

I’ve always lived by the programming adage, “Get it working, then make it either readable or fast.” When you are developing games or other high performance applications, the making it fast part can consume a lot of your time. I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent looking at call graphs. What do you do when you’ve determined your bottleneck though? Most people start looking at common things like unraveling loops and recursion or creating look up tables (LUTs). [Read More]

I have to say, JavaScript has come a long way. For some reason, I was reminded of my first JavaScript based website today. Back in my day…Seriously though, this was twelve years ago. I designed a windowed system for my personal website and I was quite pleased with it. It had a start menu at the bottom left of the browser. You would click on it and there would be a menu with links to my blog, pictures, resume, etc. [Read More]

If anyone has bought razor blades lately and not had steam come out of their ears after looking at the price, I commend you, independently wealthy person. For me, it’s always been a nagging issue. I have a rough beard and go through a cartridge every 7-10 days. I spend about $15 per month on blades. I don’t spend $15 per month on all the rest of my personal hygiene. I blame part of this on the manufacturer. [Read More]